As an individual working in a growing business, I am always looking for the most efficient ways to generate high quality leads.
It is apparent from several of my own enterprise clients that your own colleagues are a great source of qualified leads since they communicate with organisations that might also require your services.
Boston Consulting Group have conducted some interesting research (below) to find that your first personal touch point with a potential buyer will be after the prospect gathers information, evaluates a supplier and even potentially selection! I don't like those odds much.
In order to generate more leads and get to the front of this buying journey you simply need your colleagues to be communicating your product/service when appropriate to their contacts (consultants, accountants, lawyers and technology vendors are a great example).
Internal communications are essential to make sure that your colleagues are well informed of your market activity and product offering. The content to demonstrate this is important and needs to come from the expert who works in this domain, otherwise why would risk sharing to your precious contacts?
A great way to communicate this content is through an internal newsletter containing your internal experts' timely and relevant content about their area of the business, how the product/service best fits the market. The content can then be easily distributed from one expert to another - Expert-to-Expert marketing.
The good news is, according to Edelman and LinkedIn, the content you write only needs to be short! Even better, if you share a colleagues expert content with your audience, it has a high impact since it comes from a trusted source.
By doing this you are likely to jump the queue to the 'information gathering' stage of BCG's diagram below rather than a potential customer find out about your product as they are making a selection.